Traveling Light

by Bill Barich

  It was in this smooth and effortless fashion that the two hundred and thirty-eight yearlings were married to investors. The only crack in the continuity occurred on the final evening of the sales, when the demonstration that Finney had alluded to actually took place. A small group of protesters marched from nearby Congress Park to the front doors of the pavilion. They called themselves RAM—Redistribute America Movement. They were mostly young, except for a black woman in a wheelchair and a middle-aged war veteran on crutches, and they handed out mimeographed circulars. Their leaders claimed that the Fasig-Tipton auction would generate more than $1,800,000 in tax write-offs for the rich people at Saratoga, while federal budget cuts were taking away $400,000 from the poor people in the area. It was difficult to tell how the figures had been arrived at, but the question underlying them was clear: How can so much money be thrown away on horses when so many human beings are struggling to stay alive? The question went unanswered, as it always does, and the protesters were ignored or rebuked. Nobody entering the pavilion seemed the slightest bit embarrassed by their presence. In the morning, on my way to the track, I found their circulars all over the Fasig-Tipton compound—in trash cans, on tables and chairs, fallen everywhere indiscriminately, like leaves.

  TWO

  ENGLANDAND ITALY

  I find the Englishman to be him

  of all men who stands firmest

  in his shoes. They have

  in themselves what they value

  in their horses—mettle and bottom . . .

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits

  Florence pleased us for a while.

  —Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

  At The Fountain

  An English person chooses a local pub in a deeply complex and emotional way, forming a bond that will last for life, so when my wife and I arrived in England and rented a flat on Myddelton Square, in the North London borough of Islington, I approached the problem of choosing my own local with an attitude that combined high seriousness and moral purpose. The first pub I tried was Crown and Woolpack, just around the corner from the square. It was a decent enough place, although dingy around the edges and somewhat humorless in character. The cheese rolls were sometimes stale. The barman I dealt with was a tough, unsmiling mug from Manchester whose presence was only slightly mitigated by that of a sunny young woman who came in to help with lunch and looked exceptional in jeans. In retrospect, I think the only reason I stayed with Crown and Woolpack for so long was that it occupies a minor niche in the history of revolutionary politics. Vladimir Lenin once lived in a room above it, back when the pub was part of an inn. A plaque on the pub wall says that a London police constable was stationed in the room next to Lenin’s and instructed to listen in on any suspect, proto-Communist conversations that might occur. The constable heard plenty, but he caused a furor at headquarters when he was asked to report, because, as he explained to his stunned superiors, he understood no Russian.

  After a while, I got tired of Crown and Woolpack and shifted my allegiance to The Old Red Lion, down the block. The Old Red Lion was very clean. It housed a fledgling theater company in an upstairs auditorium, but the tavern area downstairs was too large and never became crowded enough to produce the special feeling of intimacy and bonhomie that I consider the hallmark of a good bar. The best thing about The Old Red Lion (at least from a spectator’s standpoint) was that somebody there owned a dog who was masterful at chasing after bags of potato chips—or crisps, as the British call them. The barman or barmaid would grab a bag from a handy rack behind the bar and toss it onto the floor, and the dog would tear after it, pin it down with his paws, rip open the cellophane with his teeth, and devour the contents. He never left a chip. This was an evolved dog who had learned to accommodate—no, appreciate—the junk food effluvia of the century. If his master had been able to teach him to drink a pint of beer while he was eating, I might have signed on forever at The Old Red Lion, but the chip-chasing stunt, as spectacular as it was, did not, in the end, bind me to the joint.

  From The Old Red Lion, I moved on to Blue Coat Boy, but it was located right next to the Angel tube stop, and it had the sort of clientele you might find in a Blarney Stone off Forty-second Street shortly after midnight when the rain is falling and only people with ink in their veins are willing to venture outside. During my brief tenure at Blue Coat Boy, I was in constant fear that a random fist was about to separate my teeth from my gums, so I moved again, this time to The Agricultural, which was close to Chapel Market—a wonderful street market where I bought spuds, cabbages, and “knobby” brussels sprouts from cockney vendors whose poor pink fingers protruded from wool gloves that had been snipped off at the knuckles. At Chapel Market, the King Edward potatoes were always “new,” and the onions were always “sound.” On weekends, when the market was thronged with people buying shoes, bras, reggae records, prawns, cockles, whelks, eel pies, streaky bacon, chips, fried skate, fried plaice, fried sole, pet supplies, greeting cards, brilliant oranges from Haifa, and a thousand other items both useful and frivolous, there was a man who strolled around with a monkey on his shoulder, introducing himself to children. Some of this raucous spirit filtered into The Agricultural, but I finally decided it was too far from home, and, reluctantly, I gave it up.

  Next, I hit The Harlequin, set back in an alley just paces from the stage door of Sadler’s Wells Theatre, a venue for opera and ballet. The first night I went in, I had a pleasant conversation with the barman, who told me that a customer of his, a writer, had recently published a biography of Edith Sitwell. This was pretty high-tone stuff after the talk of vegetable prices over at The Agricultural. The Harlequin had a semisophisticated atmosphere. Ballerinas drank there, but so did stagehands, ordinary Joes, and neighborhood sots with monumental noses. It might have been perfect, in fact, except that it also attracted a large number of uptown balletomanes who wandered in on the chance that they might rub elbows with a star. They gathered in corners and gave off a mist of sensitive understanding. Sometimes the mist inside The Harlequin got so thick that it made breathing difficult, and once again, on the point of attachment, I was forced to look elsewhere for satisfaction.

  Across the street, I discovered The Shakespeare’s Head. It had all the charm of a suburban parlor in Brighton, adorned as it was with knickknacks and quaint photographs, including one of John F. Kennedy. A large television console held a position of honor in the room. It rested on a stool and confronted the patrons in such a way that it seemed to be demanding obeisance. I was always thinking I should throw some coins to it, or otherwise acknowledge its power, so I quit hanging around The Shakespeare’s Head—what was a TV doing in a pub named for the Bard?—and moved on to The Empress of Russia, where folk music groups performed once a week. There was nothing particularly wrong with The Empress of Russia, but there was nothing particularly right with it, either. It felt middle-class, well-fed, and complacent, and that put me off a little. Besides, in order to reach it, I had to cross a busy intersection near Sadler’s Wells, and I became concerned that a speeding truck might run me down as I strolled back to the flat after closing time.

  I traveled next to The Percy Arms on Great Percy Street, which was compact and friendly but somehow down on its luck; and then to Merlin’s Cave, which was dark and dank and afflicted with kids who kept playing terrible Human League syntho-pop over and over again on the jukebox; and then to Marler’s, which was alarmingly like a California singles’ bar, featuring brunettes instead of blondes. I began to despair that I would ever find a pub that really appealed to me, and then, quite by accident, as I was knocking about one evening, I noticed The Fountain on the corner of Am-well and Ingelbert Streets and stuck my head inside and sealed my fate.

  Islington is the most densely populated borough in London. Some people maintain that it’s also the ugliest. Wherever you go, you see industrial textures. The predominant colors are gray, brown, black, and, occasionally, the faded red of weathered bricks. There aren’t many trees
around, except in squares. Buildings are beat-up, ancient, grimed with soot, and often in such dishabille that it’s impossible to tell whether they’re being renovated or demolished. In the public mind, Islington has become synonymous with the word “gentrification”—that is, the process by which members of the gentry take over and transform a district previously occupied by members of the lower classes. Other North London boroughs, like Camden Town and Kentish Town, have already been largely colonized by doctors, dentists, barristers, and other professionals who could not afford the inflated real estate prices in more fashionable London boroughs, like Belgravia, Mayfair, Chelsea, or Kensington.

  In an effort to prevent the same thing from happening in Islington, the Islington Council, an elected body known to be cantankerous and left-leaning (if not downright anarchic), has acquired property throughout the borough with an eye to eventually fixing it up and then renting flats to low-income individuals and families, thereby keeping the neighborhood heterogeneous. The plan is an honorable one, but the council has constantly found itself short in the pocket, unable to produce the necessary fix-up funds, so squatters have moved into many of the vacant properties. They use a paperback squatters’ handbook to learn how to jerry-rig the toilets and electricity, and they pay no rent. This outrages there’ll-always-be-an-England types, who think that it’s unfair to exploit the system instead of letting the system exploit you.

  Among the most gentrified areas in Islington are Canon-bury, where the young Evelyn Waugh kept himself pickled, and the streets near Camden Passage, where old buildings have been converted into an arcade of boutiques, antique shops, and dear little restaurants. Myddelton Square ranks considerably below these spots in terms of trendiness. Professionals do live on the square, but so do squatters, laborers, retired people, junkies, and owners of marginal businesses. It is a rare and special place—quiet, unassuming, dignified, and somehow locked into the rhythms of the previous century. The four-story row houses that enclose the square were built between 1821 and 1827. They are brown brick, with white-coved windows and fanlighted doors. The doors are painted blue, yellow, dark green, or red, and they seem to glow with the suggestion that lives of uncommon richness and diversity are being lived behind an anonymous facade.

  In the building where my wife and I settled, there were ten flats. Ours was on the top floor. It was small, with two bedrooms and a tiny kitchen into which two average-size adults had trouble squeezing. It had no central heating, only little electric blow heaters, so we were always cold. Its greatest virtue was that it looked out on the square and St. Mark’s Church. St. Mark’s is a curiosity. It was built by an engineer, not an architect, and there is something sturdy and indomitable about it. It gave us a feeling of abiding safety. From our living room windows, we often watched children playing on swings and slides in the churchyard, while idlers sat nearby on pigeon-dappled benches. A gardener was always working on the grounds. He laid new sod where frost had damaged the grass, and tended to his rosebushes. The bushes, stripped of their greenery, were brittle and wan, but even in November a few stubborn red and yellow roses were still clinging to the branches.

  The square was named for Sir Hugh Myddelton, who was born in Wales about 1560. His parents sent him to London to become a goldsmith, and he was very successful at his trade. Myddelton also dabbled in seagoing ventures, encouraged by his friendship with Sir Walter Raleigh and other captains. Early in the seventeenth century, when London’s water supply from the Thames began to run low, Myddelton volunteered to implement a government plan to tap some springs at Chadwell and Amwell, in Hertfordshire, and bring the overflow to the city by means of a conduit. The project was completed on Michaelmas Day in 1613. The rechanneled springs were known as the New River, and a holding company was formed to manage it. Myddelton, who died poor in spite of his labors, went back to his goldsmith’s shop. It was said that he and Raleigh used to sit on the shop steps and smoke the newly introduced weed tobacco, much to the amusement of passersby.

  Because the square is so self-contained, it approximates in its turnings the pace of old village life. We could buy almost anything we needed within a half-mile radius. For milk and butter, we went to Mr. Lloyd, a Welshman like Myddelton. Mr. Lloyd is sixty-seven and nearly as broad as he is tall. He was always dressed in a white shirt, topped by a gray V-neck sweater, topped by a maroon V-neck sweater. A striped blue apron was always tied around his ample waist. He wore spectacles on the tip of his nose, and when he scurried around the neighborhood in his shopkeeper’s costume, he looked like a refugee from a road company of Alice in Wonderland. Mr. Lloyd used to own a dairy—Islington was once a dairy center. He got up at three in the morning to fill bottles with milk trucked in from the countryside. His employees earned three quarts of milk per day in addition to their wages. Empty Lloyd’s Dairy bottles gather dust in Mr. Lloyd’s windows. The best milk available at the shop is Jersey milk, distinguished by its gold cap and floating plug of cream. “Builds bonny babies,” Mr. Lloyd liked to say as he toted up our bill on the back of a brown paper sack.

  Across from Mr. Lloyd’s, there was a greengrocer’s where we bought fruit and vegetables whenever our weekly haul from Chapel Market ran low. On the next block was George Carter’s butcher shop. At Carter’s, turkeys hung by their feathered necks above gammon steaks, English lamb chops, and trays of deliquescent veal. Our butcher, Ted, was bald and skinny, with dark circles under his eyes. He was fond of hard rock music, and it was not unusual to see him lay down a few jukey steps to a radio tune while he was hacking the neck off a chicken. His wife, Maureen, from whom he was separated, was a clerk at A. R. Dennis & Co., Ltd., Turf Accountants—the betting shop next door. The books on their romance were not officially closed. Sometimes I could tell how it was going by how Maureen acted when I stopped in to make a bet. If things were good with Ted, she laughed and joked; if things were bad, she chewed on her lip and fought back the tears.

  The only other neighborhood romance we observed was at the tobacconist’s where we bought the daily papers. A young Indian couple, recently married, managed the shop. Like us, they had no central heating. He seemed not to care very much, but she was devastated by the freezing temperatures—the coldest winter in thirty-one years!—and half blamed her husband, in the same way that my wife, who took to dressing like Mr. Lloyd, in layer after layer of clothing, half blamed me. Once, when I told the woman that I was from California, in the United States, she asked in a plaintive voice, “But oh! Then why ever did you come here?” The notion that anybody would give up sunshine for snow, slush, and urban blight was as unfathomable to her as it was to the bakery lady who sold us bread or to the cashier who sold us tickets to the Merlin Baths. We swam in the icy pool at Merlin, but we never went upstairs to the private cubicles where, for about eighty cents, we could have taken hot baths in gigantic porcelain tubs. If we had died on the square, the job of embalming us would probably have gone to Thomas Treacy, whose funeral parlor was close to Sadler’s Wells. The black-bordered shop, with Treacy’s name in gilt lettering, was always a sobering sight when I passed it late at night. Through gauze curtains in the window, I could see two plain wood coffins gaping like mouths, and I always quickened my step, striding off in search of sanctuary, some place warm and giving, like my local pub.

  The Fountain is a drab brick building with absolutely no redeeming architectural virtues. It could be a factory or yet another in the endless series of row houses that constitutes North London. The only flashy thing about it is its sign, elongated and maroon. The sign bears the name of the pub and also a large painting of a gold urn (not, for some reason, a fountain) from which three symmetrical streams of gold beer rise, then fall in utter harmony. Inside, The Fountain is divided into two separate bars—the usual practice in pubs of any size. The public bar, where prices are cheaper by pennies, caters to the workingman. Its fixtures are simple, listing toward battered. It is decorated with old promotional posters for beer and cheese, a mirror that reproduces a vintage beer l
abel, and some typed notes from a concerned patron addressing the question of how to form a darts team. The team did not form during the five months I was a regular.

  The tables in the public bar wobble. The banquettes have hard seats. The crowd drinks mostly draft beer—lager, ale, and stout—while over on the other side of the wall, in the saloon bar, or lounge, liquor takes precedence. Originally, saloon bars were created to offer upgraded services and furnishings to higher-class gents who wished to bring in their lady friends without being afraid that some navvy might spill Guinness into their shoes. The Fountain’s is a plush room done in reds and golds, with flocked Victorian wallpaper, etched glass, and thickly cushioned chairs. Customers here tend to be older, stauncher, and more conservative than those in the public bar. Traffic between bars is minimal, since the English are among the most habit-prone people on earth. A visit to the saloon bar by a public-side regular is considered to be roughly equivalent to one of Lawrence’s forays into Arabia.

  The publican, Peter Keith Page, lives with his family in a flat on the second floor. Page is a fiftyish man, slender and well-tailored, whose manner might be described as studiously charming. His mustache and hair are tinged with auburn, and this, along with a sharp nose and chin, makes him look a bit like a fox. He enjoys jokes, subtle conversations, double entendres. When he takes one of his turns behind the bar, he works at a measured pace, often pausing to ask after his patrons’ health and well-being. Mrs. Page is a short, dark-haired woman with careworn features. She has a sweet smile that combines weariness with wisdom. The quality of being a “mum” seems ingrained in her, an inescapable part of her destiny. The Pages have several children—not counting regulars in need of mothering. Most of them are grown, but a teenaged daughter and a little boy about eleven still live at home. Sometimes the daughter came downstairs to meet her dates in the pub. The boy often popped in just before bed to grab a snack of potato chips or peanuts. He stood around in his pajamas, talking to the barmen or the barmaid, and there were favored customers to whom he went for gossip about soccer games. This was one of the nicest things about The Fountain—its air of domesticity, the way the lovely insistence of family life kept intruding upon the solitary world of the drinker.